@Robert Engelhardt and Amanda Lilley: what you have said is correct and is justified. GENI never announced either the freeze-out of free users (I was in the middle of much new work / much clean-up on the day they did it, and there was no sign of an impending ax to fall). Many / most contributors of the ilk of Amanda, Robert, myself and others like us who have written here have contributed enormously, and with care, to the database. If GENI wanted better consideration and care on contributors' part before Merges were initiated / accepted, GENI needed to step up to the task with many more informative pointers, pop-ups, warnings, etc., along with a tutorial if people out there needed instruction so badly. That there was such a need was obvious, actually, since in looking around a specific group one would often come across the most striking, even shocking, errors and carelessness.
Even that being so, GENI was a remarkably uninformative site wrt to procedure, appearing to take the position that genealogists have some clue what they are entering, are highly attentive to detail, etc. Many are that way, and many believe they are trying to be, but my travels through two different communities -- Central Europe pre WWII and American colonial period -- showed that standards of care, indeed the motivations for being on GENI, on the part of users were vastly different between the two communities.
So if there are "millions of bad merges" out there, GENI bears much of the responsibility; they did not educate users, at all, in the way most interactive websites do. They have been disingenous all along, and made clear only one thing: this last move was to generate income, not to improve the standards on GENI. They needed only to fill the void of non-instruction which they had created in order to move to higher standards. Also quite appalling was GENI's de-emphasizing of the importance of sources, never placing that question nor the means of supplying sources in any kind of prominent position. It was an invitation to put folks up for one's own ego gratification and leave the historical component to others, or ignored entirely. That is not, in fact, genealogy, it's just pedigree-posting. Those are different things.
As Robert said, if GENI had wanted to mimic Ancestry.com, instead of appear to be something different and thus more welcoming, they should and could have made that clear from the get-go. They had represented that they were something different, in fact. I, too, would never have started investing my time on this site, since I could have chosen Ancestry.com -- a different animal. On GENI, I and others working similarly have both entered a great deal of new **and accurate** info from sources, and also provided the source data for many records where there was none but where it was readily available and could have been entered by the original contributor. Have also added many profiles from the larger community I was working in, and done so **accurately** including contacting curators to clear up obvious mistakes, all for the aid of fellow-users in what was advertised as a collaborative project to benefit all. At least two people out there have discovered ancestors/relatives by that work who would not have done so otherwise, a kind of discovery which I had thought was a key reason for GENI's "openness." It certainly was the sort of experience which had brought me to GENI initially.
But now GENI has essentially spat in the face of the likes of us, apparently believing that to do so is preferable to improving the instructional info they put on site, and/or of setting a different sort of "qualifying" mechanism for admitting people who are serious and effective workers.
So, as with the others mentioned here I have stopped donating my time to the GENI community and won't recommend it to others,either. GENI forgets that we have other ways of maintaining our own family trees; using GENI was represented as being about much more than that and indeed it was. WeRelate.org sounds like a good new option, and there are others. But wherever one works, the site and its programmers have an obligation to make navigation simple and clear, to post warnings and even a tutorial advising of the errors they fear most, etc. In other words, not to just sit there passively acting as if the site is one thing, and then decide "ooops, a lawless society, one without guidance, is a problem" and clamp down like the Iron Curtain.
There is no credibility nor respectability in the approach GENI has taken, and worse, it means that something even more unreasonable can fall out of the sky next. So, indeed, it is goodbye GENI. It will be a messier -- not a cleaner -- set of data for the departure of the likes of us, and one all-to-exclusively focused on issues which most people regard as irrelevant, such as whose line goes back to Charlemagne, for God's sake, and how many people have entered his name. If that was the point of GENI they should have just called it "find your medieval royal ancestor" and started selling those fake heraldic coats-of-arms.
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